English, Jack

The Onion reports on the ongoing US idiom shortage. Since the report came out, the US Secretary of State has reminded Canada of its obligat...

Mark Davies and the folks at BYU have just released their long awaited BYU Corpus of American English (360+ million words, 1990-2007). Thi...

From the BNC: the ... tendency of 212 a ... tendency of 15 the ... tendency for 142 a ... tendency for 257 I can't say I see a differenc...

Recently, I discovered that there are a lot of English speakers who think that equipment can be countable. This seems to be especially comm...

I was wrestling with my daughter and my nephew when he said, "this place is T," pointing to the sofa. T is short for TO , which, ...

There has been a long discussion on the ETJ forum (see for example here ) about whether or not the distinction between English gerunds and p...

NewScientist recently published an article about the subconscious that included the following claim: "Infants do not need tutoring to...

What with the tragic filicide of Aqsa Parvezes , the word hijab has been much in the news. What I noticed that I had not before is that it ...

Underfunded Schools Forced To Cut Past Tense From Language Programs With American schools cutting the past tense from the language curricula...

A number of people who attended my TESL Ontario presentations on Thursday and Saturday seemed skeptical that modal auxiliary verbs co-occur ...

I've commented before on problems with large-scale test problems at ETS. Now, Sam Dillon, writing in the New York Times reports on a ...

I wonder if Shatner ever felt that he was hyphenating his words. Likely this is more of a cartoonist's thing.

In his new book, Musicophilia , Oliver Sacks seems to have created a new word for those sticky songs that you can't get out of your head...

The ETJ list is often a source of interesting questions. Recently, Peter Warner observed: "Listening to a British presenter, I realize...

About a month ago, Russel Smith, writing in the Globe & Mail , discussed a tendency for the meaning of technical terms, such as price p...

Believe me, English really doesn't have a future tense. Some may think this is simply a labeling preference, but it goes beyond that. Th...

A student (college-level native speaker of English) writes, "It is time to rethink the path society is on." Something in my brain ...

CBC started the week reporting on the marches in "Myanmar, formerly known as Burma". For the last two days, however, it's been...

In today's Toronto Star, Andrew Chung writes , "Promises are the currency of elections. With no platform to judge, on what other ba...

Today, Annie Kidder at People for Education posted a comment to a previous post . It's substantial enough that I'm reposting it her...